Many Israelis Unsure of Obama, but Are Ready to Listen During Visit

In this photograph released by the Israeli government on Tuesday, preparations were made for the arrival of President Obama at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv.Credit
Kobi Gideon/GPO, via European Pressphoto Agency

JERUSALEM — Obama administration officials have made it clear that the top agenda item for the president’s visit here this week is to win the hearts of the Israeli people. He has a lot of work to do.

“I don’t trust him so much,” Rachel Burger, 65, said Sunday between errands at a Jerusalem mall.

“Deep inside, I think, he doesn’t like us,” said Moshe Haim, an Iranian immigrant who drives a taxi in Tel Aviv.

“People don’t get the love from Obama,” said Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, who leads the left-leaning Reform congregation Kol Haneshama and worked on a video encouraging American-Israelis to support the president’s re-election last fall. “Bush and Clinton and Carter, these guys all had such a deep religious passion about this place, and Obama doesn’t convey that,” he added.

Though Israeli and American leaders of various political stripes insist that security, economic and intelligence cooperation between the two nations has never been closer or stronger, the personal, more emotional element of the relationship has been largely empty over the last four years.

The well-documented tensions between Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tell only part of the story: even Israelis who are harsh critics of their own leader felt snubbed when the American president skipped their homeland during his 2009 trip to the Middle East.

Many have never gotten over the speech he made then in Cairo, where he twice referred to “Palestine” in the present rather than future tense, and insinuated that Israel was rooted in the tragedy of the Holocaust rather than ancient history.

Photo

Palestinian activists walked over a poster of President Barack Obama in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Monday.Credit
Nasser Shiyoukhi/Associated Press

Others are still smarting from what they saw as Mr. Obama’s misguided demand to freeze construction in the West Bank territories Israel seized in 1967 — which yielded no results — and what they believed was the president’s too-swift abandonment of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, a trusted ally.

So while many Israelis, like people around the world, were inspired by Mr. Obama’s biography and energized by his underdog campaign in 2008, interviews with dozens of people this week suggest that the nation will greet him warily, akin to an estranged relative trying to reconnect. The White House has done everything it can to lower expectations of any major diplomatic initiative or breakthrough, leaving people searching for something much harder to define.

“It seems like people are looking for a leader,” said Tchelet Semel, 32, who works in theater and film in Tel Aviv. “They gave up on leadership from within, and they’re hoping that someone will say the words and suddenly it will maybe rekindle the hope within the Israeli people.”

The novelist David Grossman, who is something of a national muse, said Israelis are “terrified” and “suspicious,” and need Mr. Obama to “be a real friend to Israel.” He added, “A friend should tell us the truth, and not what we want to hear.”

“I wish he shows empathy to our anxieties; part of them are real,” Mr. Grossman said. “But I wish he would not collaborate with them, with our anxieties, to the extent he will justify doing nothing.”

The president will be preaching to a tough crowd. A poll published Friday in the Israeli daily newspaper Maariv found 1 in 10 Israelis have a “favorable” attitude toward Mr. Obama. (“Hateful” registered 17 percent, “unfavorable but not resentful,” 19 percent, while a plurality — 32 percent — said they did not like Mr. Obama but respected him.)

“He’s nice, he’s O.K., but that’s it,” said Suzanne Betan, 70, a resident of Gilo, a neighborhood in the part of Jerusalem that Israel annexed in 1967, which much of the world considers occupied territory, and where the White House has condemned construction. “He is not completely with us, but he is not against us.”

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, who came to Jerusalem from New York in 1983 to found the West Bank settlement of Efrat, said: “In action, he’s been excellent to us. But the music in his words has left a lot to be desired, and that’s what everyone would like to hear today.”

Video

Symbolic Visit

The Times’s Isabel Kershner on what Israelis expect from a visit by President Obama.

Among other challenges, the timing complicates his mission. Mr. Obama lands days ahead of Passover, a frenzied period of shopping and school vacation, so the typical grumbling about road closings is especially fevered. Israelis are also preoccupied with their new government, which was sworn in on Monday, relegating articles about the visit to the back pages of local newspapers.

With Air Force One scheduled to land at noon Wednesday, hundreds of American and Israeli flags have been raised on roadsides, and posters with the visit’s “unbreakable alliance” logo have been posted at the entrance to Jerusalem. An Obama ice sculpture is in the works, and the prime minister’s office has a smartphone application allowing users to track the motorcade’s every move.

In an itinerary packed with diplomatic meetings and symbolic photo ops, the expected highlight is a speech Thursday to an audience mostly of university students.

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“Maybe the visit will not have any immediate impact, but Obama will set his ideas in their hearts,” said Ruth Shafir, the spokeswoman of the student union at Ben Gurion University in the southern city of Beersheba. “And maybe the young generation will take it to the next level and can carry it forward.”

Part of the challenge for Mr. Obama is competing with his predecessors, particularly President Bill Clinton, whom Moshe Halbertal, a professor of philosophy at Hebrew University, said could still get elected prime minister in Israel. Mr. Clinton’s poignant uttering of “Shalom, chaver” — Goodbye, friend — at the funeral of the assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995, is seared in memory here as a totem of understanding, nearly impossible to match.

“Clinton was really a magician in this respect,” said Tamar Hermann, a public opinion expert who is vice president of the Open University. “His ability to project warmth is something that’s a heart-opener here.”

Ms. Hermann added of President Obama: “I’m not saying they are examining objectively what he did or what he didn’t. Either you feel it or you don’t.”

When Mr. Obama was first elected in 2008, Kippa Man, a skullcap store on the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall, stocked one crocheted with his signature slogan, “Yes we can.” Though that was a big seller, the store’s owner, Avi Benjamin, said Sunday that it had not occurred to him to order up a commemorative item for this week’s visit.

Back then, Mr. Benjamin recalled, “people thought he was the messiah.”

A customer, Elyassaf Yakobson, sighed and said, “It seems we have to wait.”